Sotheby’s has put a hard number on the marquee lot of its May Modern Evening Auction: a $40 million estimate for Pablo Picasso’s Arlequin (Buste), painted in spring 1909, consigned from the private collection of Surrealist artist Enrico Donati and his wife Adele. The painting — oil on canvas, 73.0 by 60.3 centimeters — anchors a sale Sotheby’s projects at $219.8 million low to $298.9 million high (excluding premiums) on May 19 in New York.
The Picasso is the highest single estimate Sotheby’s has announced for the sale. Executed two years after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the harlequin emerges from a dense field of geometric forms — a transitional Cubist work captured at the moment Picasso was rebuilding figure painting through fractured planes. Donati, the last surviving Surrealist when he died in 2008, bought the canvas for roughly $12,000 in the 1940s. Sotheby’s has secured the lot with both a guarantee and an irrevocable bid.
The Donati Collection Inside the Sale
Thirteen additional works from the Donati collection are heading to auction across the May series under the banner A Night in May: The Collection of Adele & Enrico Donati. Two more Donati pieces appear in the May 19 evening sale: a 1925 Wassily Kandinsky abstraction titled Rote Tiefe (Red Depth) at a $12 million to $18 million estimate, and a 1939 Yves Tanguy work, Aux Aguets le jour, at $800,000 to $1.2 million. The remaining Donati lots run through the day sale and an associated online sale.
The provenance carries weight in a market that has tightened around verifiable single-owner pedigree. Donati showed alongside Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, ran in the same circle as Yves Tanguy, and bought the Picasso when Cubism was still recent memory rather than market category.
The Sotheby’s May Marquee Architecture
Sotheby’s New York Modern Evening on May 19 is the centerpiece of a six-day stack the house projects at $422 million in low estimate aggregate. Vincent van Gogh’s La Moisson en Provence — an Arles-period watercolor and the only work from that body remaining in private hands — carries a $25 million to $35 million estimate. The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction on May 14, projected at $202.2 million low estimate, is led by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) from 1983 at a $45 million estimate, with major works from Lucio Fontana, Robert Ryman, and Mark Rothko in support.
The de Gunzburg collection — the second single-owner cycle running through Sotheby’s May sales — runs alongside the Donati material in the Modern Evening and threads through the contemporary night. Together the two collections frame the May calendar around private-collector estate provenance; Christie’s Marian Goodman cycle handles the dealer estate lane.
What the Picasso Estimate Signals
A $40 million Picasso anchored by a guarantee plus irrevocable bid is the kind of structural support the New York spring market needs heading into a season the trade has been calling “qualified.” The Now sale’s projected $202 million leans heavily on the Basquiat lead lot. The Modern Evening’s $220 million low end leans heavily on the Picasso. Christie’s three-part Marian Goodman cycle — the seven Richters that open the 21st Century Evening Sale on May 20, anchored by Kerze (Candle) at a $35 to $50 million estimate — runs the night after Sotheby’s Modern.
The pattern across the three houses is consistent: high single-lot estimates, single-owner narratives, structural guarantees protecting the top of each sale. Pre-Cubist transitional works in this size and quality have not come to market frequently this decade, and the Donati provenance — first owner, six-decade tenure, museum-quality companion lots — is exactly the kind of single-owner story spring buyers have responded to in 2025 and early 2026.
Previews open at Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries in the days leading up to the sale; the Modern Evening Auction is scheduled for 7 PM Eastern on Tuesday, May 19, 2026.
Related coverage: Sotheby’s stacks $422 million for New York’s May Auction Week — Basquiat’s Museum Security leads at $45 million. Christie’s books Marian Goodman’s $65 million estate for May 20 evening sale.
